A Career in Market Access

There is no typical way to launch a career in market access. Some people plot a detailed course, while others gradually move into the field.

Diana Maldonado and Dionna Arnold took different paths over their market access careers, but both ended up at Entrée Health . Maldonado knew she wanted to do advertising in college—and, shortly thereafter, market access—while Arnold initially aspired to a career in publishing.

What Maldonado and Arnold do have in common, though, is a passion for helping patients access the health care and medicines they deserve, along with a love of language that they use as communicators.

“I feel like I’m making a difference by communicating the idea that people can potentially live longer, healthier lives if they can get access to their drugs,” says Arnold, a Copy Supervisor with Entrée Health. “At the end of the day, showing the value of a drug in a way that can possibly get someone’s health insurance to cover the drug? That’s pretty exciting to me.”

Maldonado, SVP, Client Services Director with Entrée Health, adds, “I love that I get to use my organization and critical thinking brain to support bringing important brands to market, where they have a direct positive impact on patients’ lives. I love forming connections with our clients and building relationships as we work together on this very important work.”

A Competition and a ‘Surprise’

Maldonado got her start when she entered an advertising competition in her senior year of college. “Before that class, I had no idea of the opportunities with an agency,” she says. Maldonado’s class won first place in the New York state competition and seventh place nationally—and a career was born.

“I entered the pharma advertising space via a project management role,” Maldonado says. Then, she worked her way into a junior account position through a job opening in a market access agency. “It was an opportunity that has proven to be a lucky one, as this space is an important niche within advertising that I am fortunate to have because it fits most of my skill set,” she says.

Arnold calls her career path a “happy surprise.” “I actually fell into it,” she says. “I have an English literature background and right after college, I anticipated going into publishing. I didn’t really know what my options were at that time—I had a very limited scope of what I thought I could do with my English Lit degree.”

Arnold moved from publishing into health care communications at a medical nonprofit, writing press releases, patient content on their website, and blog posts. “I was there for seven years, and that’s when I really got comfortable with reading through medical abstracts, listening to medical experts present their work, and then me having to take it back and even interviewing some of these experts in order to write press releases about their research,” she says.

Eventually, Arnold joined Entrée Health as a copywriter. “I said, ‘I don’t have traditional advertising marketing experience,’ but I had a decade of health care writing experience, and that translated well to my current role,” she says.

Day-to-day responsibilities vary widely for the two professionals. For Maldonado, her duties center around meeting with clients and focusing on team leadership. “Typically, I will connect with my business-unit lead partner to align on the work to be done across our clients, teams, and any other agency-related needs,” Maldonado says. “I’ll also meet with the account leads to discuss their work and advise on how to navigate any issues that may be arising.”

When meeting with manufacturers to discuss their specific brands, Maldonado attends strategy meetings and provides insights based on what she’s learned during her career. On some teams, she’s the main point of contact, so her role may be to review the communications materials the team is creating for alignment with client requests and brand positioning. On other accounts, she has more of an oversight role, so she spends more time shaping strategy and serving as a sounding board for her teams.

Maldonado devotes a great deal of her thinking to the overarching strategy of serving pharmaceutical clients. “I’m looking to understand the fundamentals for how to support a product at every stage of its lifecycle and understand our client’s business from a market and internal perspective,” she says.

Soft skills that Maldonado puts to use include navigating multiple personalities and work styles across internal and external teams. “It’s everything from knowing when and how to push back on client requests, knowing how to read the temperature of a situation and how to adjust that temperature in any particular direction, to knowing who to pull in when on any given project,” she says.

Arnold, meanwhile, is responsible for developing content such as messaging, headlines, captions, or copy to support a larger brand positioning. “So, a big part of my role is developing compelling messaging for our clients, which are pharmaceutical companies—writing manuscripts, developing presentations, and looking at overarching story flow for effective messaging.”

Arnold applies her writing and editing skills to every project with a strong attention to detail. She also must be able to present her work in front of leadership and different clients. “It’s important to come to the table with the expertise of what you’re actually writing, even if everything that you’re writing, you just had to digest it only a week before, immersing yourself so much in the content where for that project, you are the expert in whatever you’re writing,” she says. “It’s being able to digest high-level clinical information and repurposing it in a way that’s understandable for someone who may not be familiar with some of the high-level clinical medical details.”

In addition to writing and editing, Arnold moved into managing for the first time, supervising a summer intern and multiple freelancers. “I have to review their work, delegate work to them, and get them up to speed on projects that I’m working on,” she says.

Keys to Success

Both say the key to success is to learn as much as you can about the field. “Listen to podcasts, take online courses, be very curious,” says Maldonado. “This is a challenging space that will make you feel very smart but also quickly humble you. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t understand something so that you can quickly turn that moment into something new you learned that day.”

Researching the company you are applying to is also critical, adds Arnold, “If you’re at the internship stage or entry-level stage in your career, during the interview process, ask if they have educational materials or courses or programming that sets them up for success when it comes to learning about market access. Entrée Health was so great about that.”

Arnold and Maldonado may be market access professionals at different points in their careers, with slightly different skill sets, but both enthusiastically took advantage of opportunities when they arose.

“Don’t be afraid to raise your hand for new opportunities outside of your day-to-day assignments,” says Maldonado. “Make all the connections; it’s a very small world. And try your hands at all types of work within the industry.”

Pivoting from one career to another is possible, says Arnold. “Don’t pigeonhole yourself out of fear because whatever reservations you have, you’re capable of proving yourself wrong. My 18 to 25-year-old self could not imagine the career that I have now. I’m just glad that I was open to new opportunities.”

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